Good Luck to You, Leo Grande - 2022
Updated: Nov 18, 2022
This review may contain spoilers.
This is almost a classic exemplar of a film perfectly crafted for yours truly. Almost. It has been rolling around the old noggin for well over half a day now, and I’m still chewing on it. It just does so many things well, and pursues such honest, naked (in all senses) themes with discussions and reflections of philosophical import, that I can’t help but forgive the few missteps I find within its walls.
I suppose the operative question now is “Where to start?” There are really so many avenues: the performances, the pregnant ideas ripe for dissection and analysis, the way the cinematographer has somehow managed to shoot a single room as if its three or four unique spaces. I suppose I’ll begin with this claim - Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is the most truthful and open picture about sexual exploration, repression, and the kind of shame that locks one in paralysis I have ever seen.
In the spirit of authenticity, I just cannot wait any longer for this next statement. Fully aware that I risk the vitriol of Austen stans and Nancy Meyers acolytes the world over, I simply must maintain that this is the BEST I’ve ever seen Emma Thompson. I just cannot believe that she took on this role and attacked it with such conviction, cunning, and aplomb. I knew she had serious chops. And the more repressive side of her character, Nancy Stokes, a religious studies schoolteacher who was as prone to chide schoolgirls on the length of their skirts as proclaim the love of the Divine, and a puritanical wife who lived 31 years faithfully with a “hit it and quit it” husband who felt no regard for her own pleasures (yes, I’m talking about the big O). These aspects of Nancy’s personality, they are right in Thompson’s wheelhouse.
But this film, among other things, is about peeling back those layers. It dives headlong into finding the desperate, lonely, and unsatisfied woman hidden underneath that wholesome shell. Nancy, besides being downright maternal with her hired “help” for these hotel trysts, is also baldly terrified, not just of the unknown, but of her own uninvited desire which keeps bubbling to the surface in the presence of this Adonis. It is in these moments that Thompson’s bold veracity is altogether magnetic. Again I say, I’ve never witnessed a more profound turn from her.
Speaking of near perfection, two-handers in single rooms like this one rise and fall almost solely on the chemistry and natural rapport between their characters. Fortunately for us all, Ms. Thompson meets her match and foil in just about every way in Irish newcomer Daryl McCormack. His concocted persona as Leo Grande is as chiseled and well-honed as his bare torso. He oozes confidence and calm and clearly takes pride in his ability to intuit his client’s desires, before delivering the goods. His entire presentation is relentlessly sex positive and smacks of enough truth that we buy the whole affect, even as we suspect there is more submerged beneath the surface. Indeed, it is Nancy’s infatuation and infuriation with Leo’s utterly compelling schtick that forms the real rub on which the conflict of the story rests.
This is, as expected, when the themes come front and center. I would contend that when the picture sticks to exploring Thompson’s slow awakening and self-opening to pleasure, it soars. This is because her evolution arises both from discarding YEARS of neglected self-care in the face of personal shame and in the recognition that Leo may just have more to teach her than vice versa. See, Nancy cannot seem to abandon her long-held notion that sex workers are somehow forced into this life, like some kind of tortured whores who cannot find a way out. Thus, as she just keeps banging her head up against Leo’s brimming confidence, she feels she simply MUST act.
So the film takes a turn at the beginning of its third act, and I have to say, I did not altogether love it. One of the key themes or threads explored in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a kind of redefinition of sex work as viable, respectable employment. Because Nancy is just so convinced that this cannot be, she begins digging into Leo’s personal background. In the process she violates boundaries and completely breaks the spell of the connection between them.
For my own part, I simply found this unearthing of Leo’s backstory to be just a bit too scant and undercooked. Subsequently, though I’m not sure if this is BECAUSE of this fact or entirely unrelated, I found the picture to be a bit preachy in its tail end. Given the utter veracity and authenticity with which the first 70 minutes are presented, one can imagine how much this feels like a bucket of ice water to the face. The positivity is there in every frame. Why the picture has to slide down a side street for a few minutes escapes me.
Even so, director Sophie Hyde lands the plane pretty nicely. She and writer Katy Brand are sure to make explicit what is only strongly implied in the first two acts. I’ll freely acknowledge that I may have had this reaction because of my own hesitation with viewing sex work in this positive of a light. Though I’ll continue to reflect on this reality, I still think the film loses nuance and subtlety when it steps aside from the emphatically compelling conversation at its heart. Put differently, no manufactured external conflict is really necessary because the war inside Thompson’s leading lady is as mesmeric as it gets.
Regardless of these slight blunders, Leo Grande represents in totality something I desperately long for in the filmic space. To put it bluntly, a picture which is entirely frank about sex and explicitly undeterred in asking the hard questions about the pursuit of pleasure. I could compose a much longer essay on the evolution of sex in film from erotic thrillers to cheap, tawdry sex comedies and now, frankly, pretty prim presentations of copulation. Suffice it to say, I long for more stories which recognize that holding up a mirror and standing nakedly before it is the requisite first step in reaching personal fulfillment.
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